T he North Sea shifts from green to grey to washed-out blue, and the rain’s coming down. Eight people are wading out into the water, heads high. Their arms rise up and slap down on the surface, bodies pulled side to side.
They are neither waving nor drowning, but dancing. These are performers from Newcastle-based Company of Others , led by director Nadia Iftkhar – she’s in the water too – rehearsing for a series of performances of Grief Floats, which will take place on the sands and in the sea at King Edward’s Bay, Tynemouth. Grief Floats is a project that began in lockdown when Iftkhar felt surrounded by grief, for those dying of Covid but also “grief at what felt like a fading sense of humanity” when it seemed to her that certain lives were being prioritised over others.
She remembers ringing up the company’s sound designer and saying, “I want to make a show about grief, and I think it needs to be in the sea.” Why the sea? Because the project’s deepest roots stretch further back than 2020. Now 42, Iftkhar had her first miscarriage when she was 21.
“I have had many more since then,” she says. It was a loss she didn’t know how to deal with, but she read that creating a ritual could help. For her that became coming down to this bay every year.
“I go on a particular day and I spend some time with my grief, being alongside it and getting to know how it is this year.” The theme expanded, the sea being a place where many lives have been lost, past a.